Midge Forecast
The Scottish Midge Forecast
Will they bite?
Pick a spot and a date. We’ll tell you the odds, and what we’d do about it.
Check your date
Midges need three things: still air, warmth and wet, boggy ground to breed in. The West Highlands have all three in summer. The coast and the cities mostly don’t. This tells you where your date lands.
This week, everywhere we shoot
Evening conditions for the next seven days, updated from the live forecast each time you load the page. Evenings matter most: golden hour is midge hour.
The whole season at a glance
Thirteen years of evening weather, April to October, scored for midge conditions. This is the chart we wish someone had shown us before we shot our first July elopement in Glencoe.
How this works
A midge can’t fly in anything more than a light breeze, goes quiet below about 10°C, hates dry air and bright sun, and only exists where there’s wet acidic ground to breed in. We score every hour of the forecast on wind, temperature, humidity and rain, then weight it by how much breeding ground each spot has. A still, muggy July evening in Glencoe scores off the chart. The same evening on the cliffs at Slains scores nothing, because there are no midges there to enjoy it.
It’s weather and ground, not a headcount. A warm wet fortnight can breed a bumper crop that bites on a day the forecast calls fine. Treat it as odds, not a promise.
What we do about it
We don’t recommend the West Highlands between July and early September. Not because we can’t cope, but because you shouldn’t have to. Edinburgh, the East Coast and the Borders are glorious in summer and the midges don’t get a vote there.
If Glencoe is the dream, come in May, late September or October. The light is better anyway. And if you’re set on a summer glen, we time the ceremony for the afternoon, keep the portraits somewhere with a breeze and there’s always Smidge in the bag.